OK – it sounds worse then it is, but with normal use Firefox is simply way too heavy for my – not too shabby – Thinkpad T61 Core2 Duo T7250 @ 2GHz with 2GB RAM. Its not a stellar machine by today’s standard by its less then 3 years old and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to run a modern browser.

But with both Evolution (that requires a couple hundreds MB of memory) and Eclipse (at ~ 600 MB memory) I can’t also run Firefox which with just a few tabs open takes up close to 1GB of physical memory (and tons of virtual). My system just comes to a standstill, and lets not talk about running – oh, I don’t know – a terminal!

So I’m using Chromium and while its developer tools are not as good as Firebug, at least it doesn’t hog up all my RAM and with a few dozen tabs open my system is still pretty responsive.

It may be the process separation in Chromium that is better, allowing the operating system to swap out completely tabs that are not used. I’ve heard some talk about having the same thing for Firefox (project electrolysis – though at this point it seems to be focused on the Fennec mobile browser) and I do hope they get on with it because Firefox’s memory consumption has grown in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years and unfortunately my computer’s memory has not grown with it :-(.

4 Responses to “The reason why I don’t use Firefox anymore”

How much does Chrome take? Because last time I checked, They’re both pretty good with the memory management but Chrome, with its complete tab isolation, takes a gb for every 300mb Firefox uses.

And right now, I got 29 tabs open and with 725mb, it’s quite a load but not a full gb. Although, I do hope that, with the new Tab Groups feature, they will completely unload everything but the current group you’re using.

I don’t use it anymore because adobe flash plugin keeps crashing and it’s pissing me off. It literally crashes about every ten minutes if I’m watching videos. It doesn’t happen in Chrome, so I use Chrome. I’m trying to find a place to let Firefox know that they suck and I don’t use them anymore. There are too many free browsers out there not to stay competitive.

I am about to leave Firefox. It was the BEST once, but now it ia just a pain the arse. Too many ads, keeps crashing and worst of all, you can’t contact it. If they don’t want communication, they have something to hide.